Tomorrow President Cyril Ramaphosa gets to make another big speech, marking another big day. It is the Day of Reconciliation. What news he might have to tell is not clear. But it seems that hopes he might use the occasion to announce the creation from next year of a national convention, a year-long dialogue about the future of the country, may come to nought.
It has been a sorry tale so far. A year ago the first suggestions that such a dialogue might help unscramble the political and ideological egg we drown in made themselves heard. The country was in a mess, we should have a proper dialogue about how to fix it, like a new Codesa, the talks that led to our first democratic election.
This was just before the election and there were fears that the call for a dialogue might be seen as a device to help the ANC out of its political hole.
Then they lost badly and the GNU was formed, and the big political foundations — Thabo Mbeki’s, the Mandela foundation, Kathrada, Biko and others — began to plan a national drive for a new deal. Or at least a new set of ideas about how we should organise our democracy and our economy.
What this would all look like no-one really knew. But two things were clear. First, the ANC and Ramaphosa wanted in.
He began to talk up the possibility of a national dialogue and plans were made to announce the plans, if not actually announce its start, tomorrow.
Equally clear was that the foundations, for their part, were tortured by the thought that an ANC-driven process would quickly strip the dialogue of any meaning. So they petitioned Ramaphosa to rather leave it to them. This would have been in the past two months.
When I enquired of the Presidency whether Ramaphosa would mention the national dialogue in his annual December 16 speech, they didn’t think so. It could mean the dialogue won’t happen
They never heard back. When I inquired of the Presidency whether Ramaphosa would mention the national dialogue in his annual December 16 speech, they didn’t think so. If that’s the case it probably means the dialogue won’t happen. It would need state funding, but that would come at a price.
It’s a shame. An authentic dialogue where there’s no political competition might sound like a pipe dream, but we are desperately in need of an exchange of ideas that doesn’t immediately disintegrate into war. Watching videos of the SACP conference and one from the EFF on Friday was profoundly depressing. The Left is ideologically trapped in the 1960s and angry.
Equally, when I broached the subject of a national dialogue with a friend in the DA recently, he said, “absolutely no need, we’ve just had an election”.
And on the fringes there are hardline capitalists, hardline anti-vaxxers and vaccinators, modern monetary theorists, privatisers and outright racists on both sides of the divide just waiting to pour cold water on anything they find less than perfect.
We are lucky that the formation of the GNU coincides with a fortuitous turn of the economic cycle. Interest rates are down and confidence is up. There will be, as there always is in the cycle here, a consumer boom.
And the GNU will wriggle and sidestep its way around a thousand obstacles at least until the local government elections, which could take place as late as early 2027.
But until we are able either to forge some sort of consensus about what we need to actually do to grow our economy and relieve the desperation of the poor we will drift endlessly from crisis to crisis. The knot in the nation’s stomach stays put. And, in a way, all of the conflicts we have as a country are themselves present in the ANC itself. It is not so much a solution to apartheid and colonialism as it is the result of them.
Because of the tensions inside it, the ANC is unable to lead except in the most primitive forms — farming out welfare to the black poor and business opportunities to the black middle class. Its enduring mantra is “transformation” but, as the election showed, even pumping up and paying its base directly is proving less and less politically effective.
The question a national dialogue would have had to answer decisively, and what the ANC and its GNU partners might address themselves, is what single thing it would take to grow our economy and, in the process, create employment. One thing it would not be is more of the same.
The easiest answer is “money”, Left and Right agree. It’s investment. But where it comes from and what it demands are at the core of our great divide. The key to consensus, though, is not deciding what’s right or what’s wrong. The key, in our great tradition, will be compromise.
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